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Mercer County Auditor Randy Grapner will retire from office on Tuesday, ending a 13-year stretch as the county's chief fiscal officer.
CELINA - Mercer County Auditor Randy Grapner will retire from office on Tuesday, ending a 13-year stretch as the county's chief fiscal officer.
Under his watch, the auditor's office and its divisions - budgetary, weights and measures, real estate, tax mapping and information technology - prided themselves on public transparency, fairness and efficiency.
"We are tasked constantly with fairness," Grapner told The Daily Standard. "We have to make sure that everything that we have is correct and very specific, and then we are listening to any of the complaints or comments that come through the door."
Grapner's office embraced technology to streamline operations and offer the public convenient ways to access a plethora of information and data.
He and his staff also devised sound, reliable formulas for distributing millions of dollars in local and state taxes to political subdivisions, school districts and libraries, according to Grapner.
"We came up with new ways of distributing those dollars and that has taken a lot of pressure off of my offices," Grapner said. "We've been able to reduce those questions because now we give them formulas for how things are done."
Grapner, a Republican, has a little more than two years remaining on his term. He decided to step down now to spend more time with his family.
"I celebrated my 72nd birthday recently. There's no one reason, there's no one good reason. It's just I have grandchildren in North Carolina that I would like too see more often," Grapner said.
"All my buddies told me, 'When it's time, you'll know.'"
Still, Grapner feels a bit ambivalent about his departure.
"It's bittersweet. Sure, I'm excited. I know it's the right thing for me to do," he said. "But I've been here now for about 14 years, so my daily routine is going to be totally shot."
Grapner has been a licensed real estate appraiser for many years and owns his own business, R.E. Appraisal Co. in Celina. He formerly owned Grapner Shoes in Celina, a business his parents started decades ago.
The county Republican Party at one point asked him to consider running for county treasurer. Grapner said the position wasn't his bailiwick.
"Then I made a statement that if I were to run for anything, it'd be auditor because I do have a good real estate background, not so much the budgetary side, but I do have a good real estate background, and I had grown up in the business arena," he said.
Grapner entered the fray upon learning county auditor Mark Giesige planned on retiring after holding the post for more than 17 years.
"I saw it as an obligation that I could perform," he said.
After a grueling eight-month campaign, Grapner won the seat in the general election in November 2010, but would soon contend with another political conundrum unleashed by then Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
"He made lots of changes. If you recall, we had a recession going on. We needed to make lots of changes," Grapner said.
But the changes enacted were a tough pill to swallow for local governments.
"The governor at that time was changing the revenue streams to the local governments," Grapner said. "So that caused a lot of pain. We had to work our way through it. I remember numerous times we as elected officials might gather for a little chat about, 'What are we going to do? What's in the best interests of the taxpayers?""
Local elected officeholders simply had to make do with less revenue.
One of the auditor's office primary duties that arouses considerable attention from the public is establishing property values. The office undertakes a triennial update on real estate sales that had taken place over a three-year period, and then a full reappraisal every six years.
The valuations of roughly 29,800 real estate parcels are used to recalculate property taxes.
The complex process involves several steps and thorough analysis. Additionally, appraisers gather aerial imagery, photos and other data to assess property changes, including improvements, additions and demolitions, and an abstract is submitted to the Ohio Department of Taxation.
"It's directed by the Ohio Revised Code. We implement the Ohio Revised Code in basically every circumstance in this office," Grapner said.
Depending on which direction property values go, the processes of reappraisal and tax collection can be a bit fraught from a public standpoint.
For instance, real estate taxes collected this year for tax year 2023 amounted to $65 million, $13 million more than last year's billing cycle, according to county treasurer David Wolters.
"We're in an emotional business here. When you're talking with costs of real estate, with taxes and with money, lots of people get very passionate on their own. They have opinions as to what we should be doing," he said. "We do everything that we can to assure our taxpayers that we are fair."
Office staff are well-trained, professional and more than capable of handling public concerns, Grapner boasted.
"Sometimes, though, there are those occasions where you just want to talk with the head guy and those people would come in," he said. "We sit and chat. In every circumstance here we have boards that will listen to complaints and so forth. So we're here to serve our general population."
The county auditor's tax maps and other documents such as deeds, property cards and tax bills are available at auditor.mercercountyohio.gov.
Users can get an exact breakdown of where their tax dollars go and much more at the website.
"The internet has given us the opportunity to go public with so much data and information these past 14 years. My goodness, we have come extreme distances with regard to technology," Grapner said. "We tried to make it in-house and we did at one point in time until we had so much digital demand with regard to photos and mapping."
The site generated immense interest from local real estate professionals, insurance companies and law enforcement.
"Once we got into it and started building these layers of data, it became very evident that we had a tool that was being sought after," Grapner said. "And now most recently we've switched over to this company Pivot Point that has created our new website. It's mobile friendly, it's fast."
IT employees are now mostly preoccupied with safeguarding digital data.
"Protecting data is the big deal today," Grapner said, noting other county governments in Ohio have been hacked. "The majority of their time is now spent on cybersecurity, making sure we can protect all this data."
Following Grapner's retirement, county commissioners will make a temporary appointment. The county Republican's central committee will then make an appointment to fill the vacancy for the remainder of his term.
Grapner said his eventual replacement will find the office, staff and processes in tip-top shape.
"I've been able to update the offices. I've been able to replace retiring employees with excellent quality employees. We are up-to-date in software, hardware, lighting in the offices," he said. "The commissioners take care of painting our walls. Our furnishings are up to speed. Those chairs were here when I came here so it's not like we were spending money like we had some. I think our budgets are good, formulas are good. We're always going to have things that pop we have to take care of."
